All of Eduardo Guti rrez s dreams gave him no idea of the dangerous path ahead. The young dream of everything except death . . . The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guti rrez is Jimmy Breslin s most passionate and hard-hitting book to date. A work of conscience that travels from San Mat as Cuatchatyotla, a small dusty town in central Mexico, to the cold and wet streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this searing expos chronicles the life and tragic death of an illegal immigrant worker, along with the broader issues of municipal corruption and America s deadly and controversial border policy. In November 1999, an accidental death at a Brooklyn construction site made headlines because the developers had major fund-raising ties to the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But the dead man s name went all but unmentioned in the press coverage. In The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guti rrez , Breslin not only gives the dead man a name but tells the story of his life: his birth in San Mat as, Mexico, his love for a woman named Silvia, and his hope of making enough money in the United States to secure a more comfortable future back home in Mexico. The story behind Guti rrez s death is one of corruption, bad politics, and indifference to people whose lives are perceived not to count. With the issue of Mexican immigration and border policy taking center stage in our national debate, Guti rrez s story takes on even more relevance. The account of his flight, his desperation in a foreign and hostile country, and his needless death at the hands of unscrupulous forces should be a wake-up call to us all. In placing this man in the story s center, rather than its footnotes, Breslin does the same thing he did so famously when he interviewed the grave digger at John F. Kennedy s funeral: he wrenches our attention back to a story s most forgotten but most human perspective. Jimmy Breslin has written a classic on the subject. Powerful, honest, and unsparing, The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guti rrez is a towering achievement by one of America

The years between 1930 and 1979 witnessed a period of intense labor activity in Latin America as workers participated in strikes, unionization efforts, and populist and revolutionary movements. The ten original essays in this volume examine sugar mill seizures in Cuba, oil nationalization and railway strikes in Mexico, the attempted revolution in Guatemala, railway nationalization and Peronism in Argentina, Brazil's textile strikes, the Bolivian revolution of 1952, Peru's copper strikes, and the copper nationalization in Chile all important national events in which industrial laborers played critical roles. Demonstrating an illuminating, bottom-up approach to Latin American labor history, these essays investigate the everyday acts through which workers attempted to assert more control over the work process and thereby add dignity to their lives. Working together, they were able to bring shop floor struggles to public attention and at certain critical junctures to influence events on a national scale. The contributors are Andrew Boeger, Michael Marconi Braga, Jonathan C. Brown, Josh DeWind, Marc Christian McLeod, Michael Snodgrass, Andrea Spears, Joanna Swanger, Mar a Celina Tuozzo, and Joel

"An outstanding and innovative study on hunting, gardening, and love magic among the Aguaruna. . . . It is both highly useful ethnographically and an important contribution to the understanding of how a primitive culture conceptualizes its transactions with nature. The book touches on cosmology and religion as well as the ethnoecology of hunting and agriculture--with an interlude on sex." --American Ethnologist

This text reproduces documents that provide a better understanding of the Latin American past and present, and draws most heavily from Latin American sources. It is distinguished by the widest variety of documentation, including art work, short stories, poetry, folk tales and travel accounts. For sociologists, historians, and all those interested in Latin American studies and history.

From the Preface by Bradford Burns: If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of the social, economic, and political life of the region, this essay regards the imposition of modernization as the catalyst of a devastating cultural struggle and as a barrier to Latin America's development. Clearly if a window to the past is opened by this essay, then so too is a new door to controversy. After most of the nations of Latin America gained political independence, their leaders rapidly accelerated trends more leisurely under way since the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the importation of technology and ideas with their accompanying values from Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the full entrance into the world's capitalistic marketplace. Such trends shaped those new nations more profoundly than their advocates probably had realized possible. Their promoters moved forward steadfastly within the legacy of some basic institutions bequeathed by centuries of Iberian rule. That combination of hoary institutions with newer, non-Iberian technology, values, and ideas forged contemporary Latin America with its enigma of overwhelming poverty amid potential plenty. This essay emphasizes that the victory of the European oriented ruling elites over the Latin American folk with their community values resulted only after a long and violent struggle, which characterized most of the nineteenth century. Whatever advantages might have resulted from the success of the elites, the victory also fastened two dominant and interrelated characteristics on contemporary Latin America: a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had had seven different currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministers with the ferocity of an Amazon piranha. This was just one of the turns in a largely unscripted and sometimes unwanted political career. In exile during the harshest period of the junta that ruled Brazil for twenty years, Cardoso started his political life with a tentative run for the Federal Senate in 1978. Within fifteen years, and despite himself, this former sociologist was running the country. And what a country Brazil, it is often said, is on the edge of modernity, striding with one foot in mid-air towards the future, the other still rooted deep in a traditional past. It is a land of sophisticated music and brutal gold-digging, of the next global superpower and the last old-time coffee plantations. It is gloriously ungovernable, irrepressibly attractive, and home to the family, friends and extraordinary life of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This is his story and his love song to his country.

The bear and the porcupine, a parable created by the author, introduces the hypersensitive Mexican porcupine and the insensitive American bear and their difficult relationship. This image has now entered Mexican political discourse. Davidow outlines the forces drawing Mexico and the US together as well as the ignorance and arrogance on both sides, which impede greater cooperation. His expansive study includes a discussion of the two "cowboy presidents" Bush and Fox. Davidow points up how the US understanding of what was truly happening in the Mexican drug world was frequently manipulated, and notes that the US immigration policy has been a failure according to any criteria. Davidow provides readers with the inside story of how Fidel Castro orchestrated a vicious revenge after growing displeased with President Fox. The book describes the Zapata revolt and the subsequent march to Mexico City. Davidow recounts many humorous details about what an embassy must go through when attending to important congressional visits, especially presidential ones. He ends the book with an epilogue envisioning the future of US-Mexican relations.

"We were all out in la charca, and there they were, coming over the ridge, a battalion ready for war, against a schoolhut full of children." Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant mothers tortured, their babies stolen and sold on the black market, homes raided in the dead of night, ordinary citizens kidnapped and never seen again--such were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. Now, in A Lexicon of Terror , Marguerite Feitlowitz fully exposes the nightmare of sadism, paranoia, and deception the military dictatorship unleashed on the Argentine people, a nightmare that would claim over 30,000 civilians from 1976 to 1983 and whose leaders were recently issued warrants by a Spanish court for the crime of genocide. Feitlowitz explores the perversion of language under state terrorism, both as it's used to conceal and confuse "The Parliament must be disbanded to rejuvenate democracy" and to domesticate torture and murder. Thus, citizens kidnapped and held in secret concentration camps were "disappeared"; torture was referred to as "intensive therapy"; prisoners thrown alive from airplanes over the ocean were called "fish food." Based on six years of research and moving interviews with peasants, intellectuals, activists, and bystanders, A Lexicon of Terror examines the full impact of this catastrophic period from its inception to the present, in which former torturers, having been pardoned and released from prison, live side by side with those they tortured. Passionately written and impossible to put down, Feitlowitz shows us both the horror of the war and the heroism of those who resisted and survived--their courage, their endurance, their eloquent refusal to be dehumanized in the face of torments even Dante could not have imagined.